Obsessed: America's Food Addiction

by Mika Brzezinski

  I had just started my TV career and I was living alone. Food was my comfort, and after Mitch’s death I kept getting heavier and heavier. It was some time before I was ready to emerge from the darkness of my grief and even think about losing weight.

  This time, at my parents’ urging and with their encouragement, I turned to the Atkins Diet. Cardiologist Robert C. Atkins described his low-carbohydrate regimen in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution in 1972. His approach was controversial, but at one time one in eleven Americans was said to be following the Atkins diet.

  It allowed steak, lobster, cheese, and eggs but severely limited carbohydrates. I inhaled food like ham and cheese omelets, burgers (no bun), and nuts. Dr. Atkins contended that his approach switched the body from metabolizing glucose as energy to converting body fat to energy, a process called ketosis that involves controlling the production of insulin in the body.

  I remember my first visit with Dr. Atkins. He reviewed my meager breakfast, which typically consisted of toast, coffee, and orange juice, and declared, “That juice is the problem. You’ve ruined a whole day right there with all that sugar.” Mom and Dad picked up the tab for my weekly visits to Atkins’ swanky, art-filled Manhattan offices, and for the steaks I sometimes devoured, with the doctor’s blessing. I peeled off fifty pounds, and kept them off for a few years. My dad did well on the diet, too.

  In the end, the Atkins approach was just one more temporary fix, but dieting in one form or another still remained a habit. I was not much for exercising, unlike Mika, who was fanatical about it. I grew up in the years before Title IX, the federal legislation that required schools to spend equally on sports for men and women. Sports were not built into my school life, and as a kid who was overweight and klutzy, I didn’t really learn to play any team sports very well, although I took tennis and swimming lessons.

  Women going to a gym to work out? Back then that was virtually unheard of. But I did join an Elaine Powers Figure Salon, an exercise studio designed for women. We donned leotards and tights and danced our way through an early form of aerobics. In those days they still had machines with belts that you put around your hips; I guess we thought that would “jiggle the fat away.”

  The dancing, combined with some Jane Fonda exercise tapes, kept my weight down for a while. Through my early TV career I managed to maintain a pretty good look. I was never skinny, but with the right camera shots I was attractive enough. In the 1980s, a size 10 was considered fine for a woman on TV. Today, an anchorwoman that large would be considered an elephant.

  I moved from my first TV job in Binghamton, New York, where I’d gone to college and started my career, to the Hartford–New Haven TV market. It was a big jump and I loved it. It gave me the chance every day to share the news with our viewers, to tell them stories that would make a difference in their lives. Viewers took me into their homes and their hearts, even sending cards to me at the station when Tom and I got married. They felt like family, and we invited them to our wedding on TV. I am sure they noticed my struggle with weight over the years, but the audience had become my friend—and as Mika has pointed out, friends are sometimes too kind to say what they think.

  In my thirties and forties I continued to exercise, joining gyms and even hiring personal trainers, but it wasn’t enough. Although I felt better, my weight continued to climb, slowly for a while, then with gathering speed. I would get “too busy” to exercise and fall off that wagon, too.

  I kept searching for a permanent weight-loss secret. I had spurts of success with portion-controlled meals from Nutrisystem. Their freeze-dried or frozen foods helped me stay in a size 12 or 14 for a while, until it was time to eat “real food” again. The switch to reallife eating was always my downfall. Counting points, calories, and grams of fat, figuring food exchanges, and every other way of measuring and weighing food made me crazy. I tried Weight Watchers, though I dreaded going to meetings and having people whisper, “That’s the gal from the news.” I should have gotten past it and said, “Hell, yeah, it is . . . and I am just like you, I need help,” but I was too embarrassed.

  I’d be vigilant for a while and lose some weight. Then I would hit a plateau and think, Why bother? Or I’d start sneaking snacks that “didn’t count,” like a spoonful of peanut butter right out of the jar, or anything that I could eat over the sink. A glass of wine on Saturday night became a cocktail and a glass of wine, and eventually I was having a glass or two every night of the week. I tried to be honest and count the calories allotted for the day or the week, but eventually the counting and the weighing and the vigilance would break down again.

  Luckily for me, my husband was always supportive of my weight-loss efforts. I never suffered from the sabotage syndrome so many women complain about. He wasn’t ordering pepperoni pizzas while I was dieting, but when I was willing to indulge, he was, too, and that meant Friday night pizza or Chinese takeout and lots of eating out. I’d indulge, feeling like a normal person for a while. But I never compensated quickly for the extra calories, so I steadily gained weight. Then I’d be back on another strict regimen, trying to drop twenty-five or more pounds.

  Over time I went from a size 10 to a 16. Talk about denial.

  The only time in my life when I was not obsessed with food was in the mid-1990s, when my doctor prescribed the drug combination fenfluramine-phentermine, commonly known as fen-phen. Losing weight became effortless because I was never hungry. I stopped thinking about food all the time. For the first time in my life I could go to a party without heading to the buffet table. I no longer cleaned my plate at every meal and our dog discovered table scraps for the first time, because there actually were leftovers. I packed a lunch for work, and at the end of the week five of them would be sitting in the newsroom fridge. I had forgotten to eat, something that was once unheard of for me.

  I got back to my ideal weight and actually wore a size 10 again. I was elated, and not only because of the serotonin release triggered by the drugs. But as my TV station’s consumer reporter used to say, “If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.” That was definitely the case with fen-phen. A thirty-eight-year-old client at the nail salon I frequented, who had been obese since childhood, started using fen-phen about the same time I did. She got very thin, and then suddenly died. There was no autopsy, but people whispered that fen-phen had killed her.

  This made me nervous, but I kept on using it because it felt so good to be thin again. As a TV journalist I even reported on studies suggesting the dangers of fen-phen, but my desire to look good was so strong that I ignored the health risks. I was probably lucky when the matter was taken out of my hands. By the late 1990s, the drug combination had been linked to pulmonary hypertension and heart valve problems and pulled from the market. I decided not to join the class action lawsuits against the manufacturers, but I held my breath for years, fearing that cardiac damage would show up. Thank goodness it never did.

  I kept the weight off for a while even without the drug, but as you have probably figured out by now, I gained it all back.

  For me and just about everyone else who has weight issues, the real trouble is keeping off the pounds after you lose them. I’ve always felt a kinship with Mark Twain, who once observed, “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” The same could be said of me; just substitute the words lose weight for smoking. I can’t even begin to calculate how many pounds I have lost and gained over the years.

  When I was forty-nine I set a goal: 50 by 50, meaning I would lose fifty pounds by my fiftieth birthday. At that point I was out of TV news and commuting three hours a day, round trip, to my radio job. My alarm went off at 2:30 a.m. After I had done my radio show, most days I headed to the PBS station in Hartford where I produced and hosted a magazine show. I was tired, but I knew I had to start exercising again if I was going to reach my goal. I joined a gym and lost about twenty pounds. I was on my way to 50 by 50.

  Then my health problems began. Firs
t came stress fractures in both feet, then a painful neuroma in one foot that led to plantar fasciitis and tendonitis. I spent the entire summer in physical therapy. Pain kept me out of the gym, and my weight inched back up. A year later I tripped over my dog (yes, really) and broke my foot and my elbow. Another reason not to go to the gym.

  With few other options to consider, I began to think about bariatric surgery. It seemed like an easy answer. Just about everyone who undergoes the surgery loses weight—a lot of it and quickly, too. Bette, a gifted video editor and one of my close friends, had gone through the “lap band” procedure, and I watched how well it worked for her. In gastric banding, a surgeon actually wraps a device around the upper part of the stomach to form a ring. The ring is attached by a tube to an access port left under the skin. The doctor can then control how tight the ring is by inserting saline through the port. So your “new” stomach is smaller, you eat less, and feel full with what seemed to me like teeny amounts of food. Bette lost more than two hundred pounds. Even more importantly, other health problems, known by the scary term comorbidities, cleared up.

  Prior to the surgery, Bette had been taking insulin and two oral medications for diabetes, two medications for high blood pressure, and one for her cholesterol. She suffered from swelling so severe that sometimes she could barely keep shoes on her feet. And because she had developed sleep apnea, a dangerous condition closely linked to overweight, she was tethered at night to a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine to help her breathe.

  After surgery Bette needed none of that. She was off all her medications, worked out almost daily at a gym, started riding a motorcycle, and trained to be an emergency medical technician. She even posed nude for an art class. It was obvious the weight loss had transformed her life, and I suspect it may have even saved it.

  But like most medical procedures, bariatric surgery has its down-sides, and I saw some of those up close with Bette. Vomiting, nausea, nighttime acid reflux, and other postoperative complications can be enduring problems. Bette also had a significant amount of loose skin, and considered extensive plastic surgery to get rid of it.

  Still, bariatric surgery was tempting. There are a number of possible approaches, but as I did my research, I was not entirely surprised to learn that none of them are the perfect fix they appear to be. Never mind the TV stars you see showing off their sexy new bodies after bariatric surgery. It is definitely not that simple.

  The procedure does change your life, but some of the long-term implications are daunting. I wasn’t sure I could live permanently on a diet that counts a half cup of food as a full meal, requires that you chew your food to the consistency of a fine paste, and advises you not to eat food and drink liquids at the same time.

  I was also concerned about one common and often permanent side effect of “gastric bypass,” which is a type of bariatric surgery that involves disconnecting the stomach from the small intestine and connecting it to the large intestine instead. The side effect, called dumping syndrome, happens when the undigested contents of the stomach move too rapidly into the small bowel. When people who have had the surgery eat sweets, dairy, fats, or carbohydrates they sometimes get very ill with symptoms that can include weakness, feeling faint, nausea, sweating, cramping, and diarrhea.

  I had watched two other friends struggle with the aftermath of bariatric surgery. One woman about my age had a procedure called vertical sleeve gastrectomy. Her surgeon removed 85 percent of her stomach. She chose that procedure because it avoids some of the side effects and weight regain that can accompany gastric bypass. Still, a full meal for her is about three ounces of food, and she must be constantly vigilant about what she eats. The other friend is much younger, barely out of her teenage years, and she spent weeks in a hospital and months in recovery after complications from her gastric bypass.

  Despite all that, both women considered the procedure to be a life saver. But they were also substantially heavier than I am. With a BMI of 38, I was just below the level that officially qualified for the surgery, though I’m pretty sure I could have persuaded a doctor to take me on as a patient.

  Another downside was the cost. The lap band procedure can cost between $8,000 and $30,000. My insurance company would have paid for it if I had a BMI of 40 or above, or a BMI of 35 coupled with a comorbidity, such as diabetes. Thankfully, I had no comorbid conditions.

  All the medical literature says the surgery is to be used only as a last resort. It might have been worth paying for it out of pocket if it was truly my only option, but I couldn’t convince myself of that, despite my long and checkered career as a dieter. Wouldn’t it really be better to improve my eating habits and exercise more? Reluctantly, I ruled out surgery. There had to be another way.

  At the time Mika hit me over the head about my weight, I was in deep denial about how dire my situation was. I was in my mid-fifties and weighed 250 pounds. There, I said it. 250 pounds. I can hardly breathe just writing down that number on the page. It is so shocking, even to me. I weighed more than some NFL players.

  At the time Mika hit me over the head about my weight, I was in deep denial about how dire my situation was. I was in my mid-fifties and weighed 250 pounds.—Diane

  How did this happen? I look in the mirror and I cannot believe what I see. I was never skinny, but at size 10, I was once described by a TV critic as “comely.” Now I am pushing a size 20? My heart is pounding as I read and reread this line, but I’ll say it again: 250 pounds.

  “You’re fat,” Mika said. I was.

  I began to craft a program that I hope will bring long-term permanent change. I’m done with promises of a quick fix, and I know from experience that restricting what I eat is not enough. After years of yo-yo dieting, I know firsthand that people who don’t exercise lose muscle and fat while dieting, but when they rebound, they gain back the fat.

  The first thing I needed to do was to get off the couch and into the gym. But with all my pains, aches, and general loss of fitness, I was nervous about getting injured. Those stress fractures in my feet, which developed after the ambitious weight-loss program I had started several years earlier, eventually led to a raft of related orthopedic problems. For several years I had been in and out of physical therapy. I couldn’t afford to go through all of that again.

  I asked my doctor and my physical therapist how to transition from physical therapy into the gym without injury, but neither had a solid recommendation. I’d worked with trainers on and off with some success, but this time I needed someone who could also address the myriad medical issues I was developing. I looked at several hospital-sponsored programs, but most were targeted at cardiac patients.

  The more I looked, the less I was convinced I could find a trainer and a gym that could really help me. I knew I couldn’t afford another injury, and besides, in my current condition I was less than enthusiastic about being surrounded by Skinny Minnies. Then two very caring friends came to me with a suggestion (you might even call it an intervention). They were getting great results with a trainer who had a radically new approach and a rare ability to motivate clients and inspire change.

  My friend Anna is fit and athletic, but she’d had to undergo knee surgery. She said this trainer had helped her to heal, and to take her workouts to a new level. The other friend is a TV weatherman whose weight had climbed to over three hundred pounds. Joe was a longtime colleague, and I knew he had struggled with his weight for years. He was turning fifty, and had recently lost eighty pounds and maintained the loss. He said he was in better shape than he had been in his days playing college football. The trainer, he told me, counseled him on nutrition and “gets inside your head.”

  At their urging, I looked into Akua Ba Fitness, a one-on-one training center in West Hartford operated by D’Mario Sowah. I needed someone special. My fear of being injured again, coupled with my embarrassment about my size, called for someone who could go above and beyond the usual requirements. It was a tough combination to deal with, but I was lucky
enough to meet someone who could. D’Mario is a master trainer who is experienced and well versed in fitness and anatomy. The small size of his studio also meant I would have some privacy—definitely a plus.

  In terms of life circumstances, D’Mario and I are polar opposites. He is a young African American born in Ghana, plucked from an orphanage and forced into slavery as a child soldier. As we worked out together, I slowly learned his extraordinary life story, including his escape that led him to America. The way he rebuilt his life is incredibly uplifting.

  D’Mario’s regimen involves healthy eating and a training method that foregoes most exercise equipment, relying instead on using your own body weight as the resistance in your workout. At our first meeting he analyzed my fitness level (virtually nonexistent) and talked to me about my goals and my failure to lose weight over the last fifteen years. My tears flowed (again), and in spite of our differences I sensed the inner spirit of this man, his nurturing soul. About my weight and my awful physical condition, D’Mario simply said, “Lay down that burden; that burden is mine to carry now.”

  About my weight and my awful physical condition, D’Mario simply said, “Lay down that burden; that burden is mine to carry now.”—Diane

  No one had ever referred to my weight like that before; as a burden I had been carrying. And yet of course it was. I had felt so much shame because I had not been able to rid myself of it. I felt like a failure after all the false starts, all the dashed hopes of recent years.

  Through my career I had been seen as a winner: popular, talented, and able to reinvent myself every time a curve ball was thrown my way. When I was downsized from my position as a news anchor, I became a morning talk show host at the biggest radio station in the state, and landed a contract to produce and host programs at the PBS network in Connecticut. I turned my TV work into six successful books.